The present invention is generally directed to telecommunication services and more particularly to determining a telecommunications address associated with a caller's location.
As used herein, an End User is a customer placing an order for telecommunications services. A telecommunications provider is a company providing service from a location associated with an End User to a network service location. An Access Provider is a company providing connectivity from the location of the End User to the Telecommunications Provider's network edge location.
When an End User places a new customer order with a representative of a telecommunications provider for new services (e.g., data services or telephone services), the End User typically provides the representative with the mailing or postal address at which the End User would like telecommunication services to be provided. This address, however, may differ from the address stored by the Access Provider. Specifically, each Access Provider maintains a database storing telecommunications addresses for the different locations they serve.
These telecommunications addresses may differ from the mailing or postal address associated with a location. For example, a postal address associated with a location may be “XYZ West Mt. Lexington Avenue, ABC City, LRP State, 12345” while a telecommunications address stored in a database for the location may be “XYZ Mt. Lexington Avenue West, ABC City, LRP State, 12345” or even “XYZ West Mount Lexington Avenue, ABC City, LRP State, 12345.”
End User mailing addresses may also be vanity addresses such as 1 Commerce Square which is valid for mailing purposes. The Access Provider may have a telecommunications address in their database of 392 Main Street for that vanity address. The End User may also have a building location that is on a street corner and, as a result, has two street addresses.
These slight differences (in the above examples, the “Mt.” to “Mount” and the location of “West”) or use of vanity or corner addresses often result in errors in the providing of new services to the location. In particular, a representative of the Telecommunications Provider must submit an order to the Access Provider that includes the correct telecommunications address. The Telecommunications Provider representative queries the Access Provider database attempting to verify the End User's mailing address. A query for a particular mailing address, however, typically must match the address stored in the Access Provider database (i.e., the telecommunications address) exactly. If an exact match does not occur, then the database may indicate that the address being searched for does not exist in the database. The database may also provide addresses that are similar to the mailing address being queried, but these addresses may be far from the queried address (e.g., same street but a different town).
The representative of the Telecommunications Provider may have to guess which telecommunications address to provide services to or may have to contact the End User again to ask additional questions as to the customer's location. The representative may then have to perform one or more additional queries to the Access Provider database in an attempt to locate the correct telecommunications address associated with the customer's location.
This querying of the database may waste a significant amount of time and could result in delay in providing the services. This often results in an unhappy customer. For example, if the Telecommunications Provider representative selects one of the telecommunications addresses provided by the database in response to a query for a particular postal address, the customer may be unhappy if the Access Provider designs the service and sends installation people out to the incorrect location. If the selected address is incorrect, the customer may be unhappy because his service will be delayed, and a second party may be unhappy if the service provider comes to the second party's address to install service.
Therefore, there remains a need for an improved technique for determining a telecommunications address as stored by an Access Provider.